Data Product R&D

ERD’s data products and data services are an integral part of the research effort in the Division. Research and development of data products is a feedback loop involving:

Providing and consulting about the data which identifies areas where new products are needed

Research about the data improves existing products and develops new ones

Research using the data provides credibility to the data and ensures that the data products and services are tied to the NOAA mission.

The best known of ERD’s data products is the Upwelling Index [1, 2]. More recently the Northern Oscillation Index (NOI) [3, 4] has been developed as an extra-tropical alternative to the ENSO-related Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) [5]. ERD is in the process of developing further indices that measure the long-term and seasonal changes in both the surface and subsurface structure in the California Current System, that define “hot spots” where species aggregate in the ocean, and to census eddies in the ocean.

Recent research has included studies that compare upwelling and other related transport indices as presently calculated with those from Quikscat. The Quikscat winds are at a higher resolution that those presently used in ERD’s indices and can potentially provide higher-resolution products [6] with improved coverage.

A project funded by the Pacific Regional Integrated Data Enterprise (PRIDE), ERD and NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center will be providing new indices calculated from newly developed, six-hourly high-resolution wind and sea surface temperature products [7]. Comparisons will be made with existing products both to ground-truth the new indices and to characterize the differences and improvements between existing and new indices.